More companies should be like Spotify: Use my activity history to show me stuff I didn't know existed, but have a high probability of liking.

There was an article I can't find that had a title like "Spotify Has The Only Algorithms That Don't Terrify Me", and it's true: Companies should spend time making my life better, not making me easier to advertise to.

Building a product I spend a lot of time on (like Spotify) makes ads take care of themselves (or, in Spotify's case, makes me a long-time paying subscriber).

Using playtime metrics could be problematic. Some games have hundreds of hours of replayability, while others you get the complete experience in 15. That doesn't mean that they I necessarily prefer one to the other. I wonder if they use some cap in their model, to account for that, or compare with average playtime for all users? I guess if the network gets good feedback based on what recommendations people actually wishlist/buy/play, maybe it can figure that out anyway.

Why do I suspect my suggested queue is still going to be an endless stream of Anime Bullshit with a side of Space Nonsense?

I get it, I played Elite Dangerous. I bought a couple old Final Fantasy remakes (and never played them). But whoever Steam thinks I am, that ain't me.

Give me an option in the store to hide Greenlight (or whatever they call unfinished crap now) entirely. And honestly, I'd rather be shown a stream of AAA or at least AA content that I may not be interested in than a neverending river of $10 homebrew garbage that totally fits whatever genre they think I like. Yes, I played Hearts of Iron. No, I am not interested in twelve other cheap knockoffs of it. Stop it, Steam.

On the one hand, this does seem kind of nice as a way to bring some cool titles to the forefront that otherwise might not get their day in the sun. On the other, this also feels like the harbinger of even more copycat asset-flip games trying to ape what's popular for a quick buck.

Hmmm that sounds like a really good deal. But I got a better one for you. Stop hosting shit games, and especially stop hosting unfinished games that will never be finished.

And who gets to decide what the shit games are? What metrics should be used? Plenty of Early Access titles are still legitimately entertaining, and plenty of AAA releases come out broken and near-unplayable. Just saying "don't host shit games" is nebulous and doesn't solve anything.

Optimizing for "engagement" is a bad plan- just like youtube, it creates incentive for "use time" instead of quality. There's a way in which its good- hours of play per dollar isn't a useless metric, but if youre essentially marketting with that you will end up promoting high-grind padded experiences.

Like skippable cutscenes? Those are going to go away when a dev realizes it reduces his games playtime ranking.

Hopefully this doesn't become dominant enough that it distorts design...

Optimizing for "engagement" is a bad plan- just like youtube, it creates incentive for "use time" instead of quality. There's a way in which its good- hours of play per dollar isn't a useless metric, but if youre essentially marketting with that you will end up promoting high-grind padded experiences.

Like skippable cutscenes? Those are going to go away when a dev realizes it reduces his games playtime ranking.

Hopefully this doesn't become dominant enough that it distorts design...

Also see how much "idle games" ended up gaming the metrics on sites like Kongregate, because people "played" them for hundreds of hours.

Good thing that AI recommendation engines haven't caused things like flat earthers, pizzagaters, qanon, and anti-vaxxers to be a thing again. Truly there is no obvious downside to using this type of setup instead of curating the content you're hosting. This has never led to something becoming more of a toxic hole than it was before that started.

Optimizing for "engagement" is a bad plan- just like youtube, it creates incentive for "use time" instead of quality. There's a way in which its good- hours of play per dollar isn't a useless metric, but if youre essentially marketting with that you will end up promoting high-grind padded experiences.

Like skippable cutscenes? Those are going to go away when a dev realizes it reduces his games playtime ranking.

Hopefully this doesn't become dominant enough that it distorts design...

Play time metrics and scummy tactics like this will become a major issue like MTXs once Streaming services start to pay by playtime. I think Apple has already stated thats how Apple Arcade will pay content creators.

Optimizing for "engagement" is a bad plan- just like youtube, it creates incentive for "use time" instead of quality. There's a way in which its good- hours of play per dollar isn't a useless metric, but if youre essentially marketting with that you will end up promoting high-grind padded experiences.

Like skippable cutscenes? Those are going to go away when a dev realizes it reduces his games playtime ranking.

Hopefully this doesn't become dominant enough that it distorts design...

Also see how much "idle games" ended up gaming the metrics on sites like Kongregate, because people "played" them for hundreds of hours.

Just wait to see the stats on Team Fortress 2. Thanks to the hat trade and the Xmas 2011 sale, the average "playtime" is easily in the hundreds/thousands per player.

Steam's game suggestions have always been horrible. The have only gotten worse with the proliferation of indie junk and unfinished early access spam.

I do not have high hopes this will be better.

Do what I do - read your favorite blogs/gaming rags, talk to friends. Decide what game you want - then buy it. If you are lucky you can get it in a humble bundle cheap with a dozen other games you will clutter your library with and never play.

Optimizing for "engagement" is a bad plan- just like youtube, it creates incentive for "use time" instead of quality. There's a way in which its good- hours of play per dollar isn't a useless metric, but if youre essentially marketting with that you will end up promoting high-grind padded experiences.

Like skippable cutscenes? Those are going to go away when a dev realizes it reduces his games playtime ranking.

Hopefully this doesn't become dominant enough that it distorts design...

At least there's a higher barrier to entry with buying a game in comparison to auto-playing youtube recommendations. So we got that going for us.

Optimizing for "engagement" is a bad plan- just like youtube, it creates incentive for "use time" instead of quality. There's a way in which its good- hours of play per dollar isn't a useless metric, but if youre essentially marketting with that you will end up promoting high-grind padded experiences.

Like skippable cutscenes? Those are going to go away when a dev realizes it reduces his games playtime ranking.

Hopefully this doesn't become dominant enough that it distorts design...

Also see how much "idle games" ended up gaming the metrics on sites like Kongregate, because people "played" them for hundreds of hours.

Just wait to see the stats on Team Fortress 2. Thanks to the hat trade and the Xmas 2011 sale, the average "playtime" is easily in the hundreds/thousands per player.

LOL. Future is a strange place. We were promised flying cars and instead we are trading imaginary hats with strangers we let into our computers.

Optimizing for "engagement" is a bad plan- just like youtube, it creates incentive for "use time" instead of quality. There's a way in which its good- hours of play per dollar isn't a useless metric, but if youre essentially marketting with that you will end up promoting high-grind padded experiences.

Like skippable cutscenes? Those are going to go away when a dev realizes it reduces his games playtime ranking.

Hopefully this doesn't become dominant enough that it distorts design...

Also see how much "idle games" ended up gaming the metrics on sites like Kongregate, because people "played" them for hundreds of hours.

When I bought GTA4 back in the day, it came with that BS Rockstar Social Club. Steam decided that because I left SC running in the background, that meant that I was playing the game for that length of time.

So ~4 hours of GTA 4 before I decided I didn't like it, but Steam thinks I was in it for around 140.

They'll definitely have to do more than just look at play time, they'd have to check out active play time.

Final Fantasy IV on Steam has a launcher that is _really_ easy to forget to shut down after you're done, but still racks up the playtime counter. Similarly, as much as I enjoyed Portal 2, I definitely didn't play it for 300 hours, I just forgot to shut it down.

Measurement faults aside, it's definitely possible to make decent recommendations using only view-time data. I was once gifted a bunch of anonymized tv-viewing data and ran it through the predictionio default recommender template and it made _really_ good inferences for "if you like this show, you'll also like this show". Took about a day to do the work.

Though I wonder what their final metric that they're optimizing for is. You could easily do:"Because you've put X active hours into SuperGame, you're likely to put active hours into UberGame!" (good for users to find new content)

or you could do purchase probability:"Because you've put X hours into SuperGame, you're likely to PURCHASE UberGame" (good for Steam in the short term. Once they get paid, they're happy)

If they sort by purchase probability, they'll probably make more money. Accurately recommending games that users will sink hundreds of hours into is user-friendly, but it may actually prevent more sales because users will still be enjoying their last recommendation.

Steam's game suggestions have always been horrible. The have only gotten worse with the proliferation of indie junk and unfinished early access spam.

I do not have high hopes this will be better.

Do what I do - read your favorite blogs/gaming rags, talk to friends. Decide what game you want - then buy it. If you are lucky you can get it in a humble bundle cheap with a dozen other games you will clutter your library with and never play.

Using playtime metrics could be problematic. Some games have hundreds of hours of replayability, while others you get the complete experience in 15. That doesn't mean that they I necessarily prefer one to the other. I wonder if they use some cap in their model, to account for that, or compare with average playtime for all users? I guess if the network gets good feedback based on what recommendations people actually wishlist/buy/play, maybe it can figure that out anyway.

That's the beauty of this idea. If you put 100 hours in Game A, 20 in Game B, and 5 in Game C, the algorithm can find other people with similar playtime metrics, see what other games people are playing that you haven't, and recommend game H because you haven't played it and the 30,000 other people who have put 26 hours into it.

The corollary being that 26ish hours is a fairly significant amount compared to the total playstats for that game.

Idle games won't get recommended unless other people with your playtime profile also play them.

That's why new games have the chicken and egg problem. Nobody else has played them.

Steam's game suggestions have always been horrible. The have only gotten worse with the proliferation of indie junk and unfinished early access spam.

I do not have high hopes this will be better.

Do what I do - read your favorite blogs/gaming rags, talk to friends. Decide what game you want - then buy it. If you are lucky you can get it in a humble bundle cheap with a dozen other games you will clutter your library with and never play.

Right Click -> Categories -> Hide in my Library

Or something close to that. Goodbye clutter.

But, but they look interesting - I may play one of them for 5 minutes 3 years from now!

Why do I suspect my suggested queue is still going to be an endless stream of Anime Bullshit with a side of Space Nonsense?

I get it, I played Elite Dangerous. I bought a couple old Final Fantasy remakes (and never played them). But whoever Steam thinks I am, that ain't me.

Give me an option in the store to hide Greenlight (or whatever they call unfinished crap now) entirely. And honestly, I'd rather be shown a stream of AAA or at least AA content that I may not be interested in than a neverending river of $10 homebrew garbage that totally fits whatever genre they think I like. Yes, I played Hearts of Iron. No, I am not interested in twelve other cheap knockoffs of it. Stop it, Steam.

I guess we'll see if this is an improvement. I'm super skeptical.

Seems to me they're going to have issues in two ways.

This particular method for creating recommendations is predicated on a user being active ON STEAM.

I don't know how typical MY method of dealing with Steam is, but they'd have a hell of a time getting any recommendations for me, since I don't play any games through it.

I might BUY the game through it, but I don't let Steam run at all unless I want to buy another game. Typically, I play the game stand-alone, without using the Steam launcher. Not being much of a social media person, and loathing bloatware running for no reason in the background, I shut off anything that I don't always use. My computer simply runs better that way.

I know there are people out there who do the same kinds of thing, but don't know what proportion of Steam users they might make up.

Another aspect they seem to be overlooking are the folks who are dismissive of recommendations after having been flooded with bullshit for so long. When you ignore things long enough, it's a new habit to break to begin looking at them again.

I think what would be much more useful would be using AI to help narrow down a SEARCH for a game, rather than having the AI make guesses based on your game choices and play style. That's a much more active role, with a much higher chance of a payoff (selling a new game to the end user). Smoothing THAT process out would be very beneficial for all.

As it is, their approach changes little, and is still subject to a lot of guesswork, with less chance to make sales than by being an active aid while someone is looking for a game to play.

Using playtime metrics could be problematic. Some games have hundreds of hours of replayability, while others you get the complete experience in 15. That doesn't mean that they I necessarily prefer one to the other. I wonder if they use some cap in their model, to account for that, or compare with average playtime for all users? I guess if the network gets good feedback based on what recommendations people actually wishlist/buy/play, maybe it can figure that out anyway.

No kidding.

Any given sandbox game will do that from Kerbal (screwing up your Duna reentry system and having to figure out something new *and* getting a new planetary launch window) to Terraria.

Then there's the Borderlands series that's just entertaining and funny enough that it works great as a game to veg out with friends.

Play hours accumulate for different reasons. Maybe the patterns in this new system will work out, who knows? I'm not incredibly confident given that Amazon insists on humorously re-selling me stuff I already bought on the site: "Oh, you bought an oscilloscope? Here, you *obviously* need five more, right?"